A weblog examining sexual politics in higher education and beyond.

Who can possibly block gay marriage from becoming a legal reality in California? Steve Cooley is committed to the implementation of Prop 8 and if he his elected as Attorney General of California, he would be in a position of going forward with an appeal of the recent judicial judgement that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Presently, Attorney General Brown and Gov Schwarznegger won’t appeal.

So Cooley could not successfully get Polanski back into the country so hPolanski be persecuted. Of course, Cooley should never be counted out, not when he could impinge on the rights of millions of gay men and women. If Cooley is elected as Atty General for California, anything is possible. I would not put it beyond him to broker a deal via which h Polanski would return to California in exchange for Cooley not blocking the implementation of Prop 8.

What the Independent is concerned about is the continuing attempt in the UK to ban extreme pornography. Most immediately The Independent is concerned about the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 which takes effect in less than a month. Section 63 of this law prohibits pictures on the internet of someone having sex with a corpse as well as images of bestiality.

The Independent points out that-

The usual problems with such legislation are that in the first place the law is adopted in a mad hurry and is thus vague and unclear and, second, a set of general principles is wrongly deduced from truly exceptional circumstances.

With this law, the evidence of haste and a knee-jerk response to a specific event can be seen from the imprecise wording. As a result, the viewing of images of a number of practices that are legal, and which most people would consider acceptable if not exactly desirable behaviour between consenting adults, will become as illegal as viewing images of bestiality and necrophilia. All such viewers will have the same potential to be caught under the same dragnet.

Regrettably, the Government will probably get away with it. In these “on-message” days, no politician wants to be seen as the spokesperson for sexual freaks. A reputation for a partiality to bondage is not the way to boost the career of a junior minister or rising backbencher. And so a few more of our civil liberties are done away with – and the opportunities for police surveillance increased.

Ministers may even think they are on to a winner, by giving unpopular Sixties-style liberals a good drubbing – and a good dose of New Labour Puritanism at the same time. Well, perhaps so. It’s also possible that the Government’s obsession with regulating every aspect of peoples lives will rebound on it. We can only hope so, for the Government should beware of poking its long nose into people’s sex lives, and when it is far from clear that such intervention is necessary.

The tactics used in the UK are not unique and are rather simple. Get some significant percentage of the public riled up about some sexual behavior which almost all persons agree is disgusting and obnoxious and then pass a law that goes way beyond the behaviors that led to the hysteria. In essence this is what happened in California with the passage of proposition 8. Make gay marriage illegal since if we have gay marriage then in some way this will facilitate the predatory sex crimes against children. Or as Rick Warren does, associate homosexuality with child abuse and incest.

And what is most germane to this blog, use cases of relationships between students and professors which involve coercion and harassment to ban all consenting sexual relationships between students and professors. And then present as a taken for granted assumption that such relationships undermine the integrity of the university. And, of course, once these rules are in effect, consenting student professor couples are unlikely to come forward to challenge these rules since they would then become subject to being penalized by the powers that be.

And what becomes most galling to the dankprofessor is that the belief comes into being that the laws have been successful since student professor couples have scant visibility on campus. Of course, they are not visible since they have been forced into the closet. As gays have come out of the closet on campus, student professor couples now occupy that closet. The campus moral entrepreneurs and zealots have carried the day with barely a peep from the liberty advocating professoriate. Of course, it is fear that carries the day on campus; with or without tenure, almost all faculty will not speak up for their colleagues, colleagues who only want the basic right of sexual privacy and to be left alone.

And when it comes to this blog, I know that fear prevents many professors and students from posting comments. In 2008 I received many emails sent directly to me from students who have found these campus fraternization laws to be oppressive and hurtful. I have done my best to write helpful responses to these students. And I have done the same for a much smaller number of professors. So even though there are few comments on the dankprofessor blog from students and professors, I do believe that I am getting the dank word out. And the dankprofesssor will continue to blog.

I greatly appreciate the support of my readers in 2008 and am looking forward to the dankprofessor blog doing more good in 2009.

(The dankprofessor got his dates wrong. Actually, the Yale Sex Week this post deals with was held last February. I guess I should read my google alerts more closely. In any case, irrespective of my being dated, my criticisms are still valid.)

Sex Week at Yale starts on February 10 and there will be some excellent speakers and sessions. Of course, there are sessions dealing with pornography since the Yale Sex Week is partially sponsored by the largest porn producer in the world vivid.com, but there is also a partial Christian sponsorship by xxxchurch.com And, as to be expected the so-called Christian participation is minimal with participation only occurring on February 15 in the context of the debate on porn.

There is no ideology behind Sex Week. Its mission is simple: present students with a range of perspectives about sexuality to get them talking, so that they can begin to reconcile serious issues of love, sex, and relationships in their lives. Let the discussion begin.

But the dankprofessor has some difficulty with the assertion of no ideology. If there is no ideology, why are there no sessions and no speakers on gays and lesbians as well as bisexuals and the transgendered? If ideology was not relevant to the exclusion or omission, then one might conclude that similar to Iran there are no gays at Yale. And certainly the creators of this Yale Sex Week could have concluded that some Yale students might have an interest in gay marriage. Possibly some of the sessions include matters relating to homosexuality, but such is not explicitly stated. However, looking at the sessions on porn, it is quite clear that there is nothing on gay porn.

Matters relating to homosexuality and gender reflected the most major exclusion, but there are other major exclusions- S & M completely omitted, nothing on prostitution and no mention of the the most prevalent sexual behavior at Yale- masturbation. Certainly, pornography generally ends up being about masturbation, but the dreaded M word is infrequently mentioned. Masturbation appears to be cloaked at the Sex Week at Yale under the rubric of “pure romance”.

On the positive side for the dankprofessor, there is no required sexual harassment training component, and nothing about how consensual student professor relationship “always” harming the student and the university. In fact, there is absolutely nothing about consent in the whole program; such does not represent a positive since the mixing of sex and alcohol I trust is commonplace at Yale. And without any mention of consent there is, of course, nothing on rape.

The entire schedule for Sex Week at Yale can be seen by clicking here.

Norris doesn’t get why so many Californian gays are upset with the passage of Prop 8 invalidating the California State Supreme Court decision legally affirming the right of same sex marriage.

Maybe Chuck Norris would get it if there was a democratically imposed fiat that took away his right to marry. In all probability, Norris takes it for granted that he has a fundamental right to marry.

The dankprofessor believes that if a bunch of persons claiming to be religious fundamentalists took away his right to marry he would be damn angry and maybe even engage in some karate ideations. Presently he is angry that the gay married and those wishing to marry persons of the same sex are angry. He bemoans the actions of some protesters who revealed the identities of some of those who financially supported Prop 8 as well as bemoaning the actions of protestors who disturbed the tranquility of some who were partaking in church marriage ceremonies and exercising their rights to engage in marital rites.

Norris states that he is disturbed by

“the obvious inability of the minority to accept the will of the majority. Californians have spoken twice, through the elections in 2000 and 2008.

Nearly every county across the state (including Los Angeles County) voted to amend the state constitution in favor of traditional marriage.

Nevertheless, bitter activists simply cannot accept the outcome as being truly reflective of the general public.”

He then invokes “Chuck Colson, who wrote: “This is an outrage. What hypocrisy from those who spend all of their time preaching tolerance to the rest of us! How dare they threaten and attack political opponents? We live a democratic country, not a banana republic ruled by thugs.”

In Norris’s terms: “Political protests are one thing, but when old-fashioned bullying techniques are used that restrict voting liberties and even prompt fear of safety, activists have crossed a line.”

And he concludes on the following note: “Like it or not, it’s the law now. The people have spoken.”

Of course, no where in this diatribe does Norris provide any recognition of the fact that our democracy is a limited democracy, limited by constitutional guarantees. He does in passing invoke liberties as in “voting liberties”, but just cannot understand that there are also liberties involving freedom of association and the freedom to marry.

For Norris and all too many of his confreres, democracy, the will of the voting majority, trumps the constitution, trumps any civil liberties. In a sense the constitution should function to protect the citizenry from the thuggery of those using the democratic process to pummel the rights of others.

For the dankprofessor, it doesn’t matter if Norris’s perspective is a result of naivete, of arrogance, of religious zealotry, or all of the aforementioned. The bottom line is that so-called democrats who do not recognize civil liberties all too often end up as authoritarians who righteously demean and degrade and often jail others as they invoke the good of the people, and affirm their superiority, albeit it a racial or sexual or marital superiority.

The California Supreme Court correctly cited the prior court decisions which nullified laws criminalizing interracial marriage. No matter that invalidating interracial bans went against the prejudices of many Americans. The right to marry then and now remains a fundamental right. And such is why the dankprofessor holds that California Supreme Court should and will invalidate Proposition 8.

Blog reports on and examines sexual politics in higher education with a focus on issues regarding sexual consent, particularly the attempted repression of student-professor consensual sexual relationships. Thie blog reflects a commitment to the values of liberty, freedom of association, freedom of speech and privacy; such are values that are under increasing attack, both intellectually and policy wise in all too many universities which have embraced a culture of comfort in the framework of a velvet totalitarianism.

In addition, the blog at times will go beyond the university and sexual politics to issues that merit our attention. Whatever the issue the dankprofessor blog will not be constrained by any ideological orthodoxy, sexual or political correctness. Hopefully, this blog will bring together persons who value liberty and freedom even in university life.

The dankprofessor is Barry M. Dank, an emeritus professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught students and engaged in various forms of professorial dissidence for some 35 years.. In his earlier years, he wrote and pontificated on issues related to homosexuality and specifically on coming out and the development of a gay identity. In 1977 he became famous/infamous for his LA Times article on the anti-homosexual campaign of Anita Bryant. Later he focused on interracial relationships and on student-professor relationships. He is the Founding Editor of SEXUALITY AND CULTURE, published by Springer NYC. During his 35 years as a professor and four years as an in-residence grad student at the University of Wisconsin, he openly engaged in propinquitous (as in propinquity) dating, dating students and having many wonderful friendships with many of his students and their families. During his early years in academia he married the daughter of a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin. Presently he is living in Palm Desert, California. His wife, Henrietta, who he met when she was a student in one of his classes, passed away in 2015. She inspired much of his activism in the area of student professor relationships. She will always be loved and her love and devotion will never be forgotten.

The dankprofessor welcomes input from blog readers. Confidential emails should be sent to him directly at- bdank22@msn.com The dankprofessor will respond to all personal emails.

Leads on relevant stories will be greatly appreciated.

Guest commentaries should be sent to the same email address for consideration for blog publication.

The dankprofessor is available for campus/class presentations on sexual politics in higher education.